In communication sessions involving multiple users/parties/terminals, transcoding is often required to enable interoperability between terminals, for example terminals equipped with incompatible audiovisual codecs and therefore having incompatible characteristics. Transcoding operations between multiple terminals may be also required for other reasons such as reducing bandwidth usage or power consumed by a particular terminal or other reasons.
However, transcoding operations require significant computational complexity, bandwidth usage, energy usage and other resources, leading to high-energy consumption, ineffective utilization of hardware equipment, and resulting in high cost of such communication sessions.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for conducting communication sessions between multiple terminals involving transcoding operations more effectively, with particular emphasis on utilizing fewer resources.